Applied Nutrition

Internet Assignment 5

Instructions:
Read the follow material and use the internet to obtain information.
Answear the questions on a seperate text document such as MS Word, Notepad or Write then send it to me as an e-mail attachment at barry_bw@yahoo.com

Assignment Five
Medicines, Other Drugs, and Nutrition

This assignment  is going to give you an opportunity to practice the different search tools we've used in several different search engines. We will be using: 

• Phrase searching. Most search engines want you to put quotation marks around terms that you want searched as a phrase, such as "vitamin c" or "anorexia nervosa". Others want parentheses. (vitamin C). Still others will automatically assume words together as a phrase, unless they are separated by an AND.
• Boolean Logic. These are the connectors that let you search more than one word. The two that we've spent some time with are:
• AND.
  AND will limit your search to only the records that contain both terms. Every time you add another term, and another AND, your result list will get smaller and more specific. 

The search strategy Eating and disorders will bring up documents that contain both words, not necessarily together. The search strategy "eating disorders", as a phrase, will bring up only the documents that contain the words together, in that order.  

• OR. 
  OR will expand your search. Now every record must contain only one of the search terms. "Nicotine gum" OR Nicorette will bring up all records that have the term Nicotine gum and all the records that have the term Nicorette. 

• Truncation. This is a way to reduce your search term down to its root form, and tell the search engine to find all variations of the term. nurs* will find any mentions of nurses, nursing, nurse, and nursery. Truncating a word will always expand your result list. If you're getting no hits, or very few hits, see if you can truncate one of your terms. 

Unfortunately, search engines use these tools in different ways. One wants the AND connector put in between the terms, one just wants the terms listed, and the AND connector is automatically put in. 

For truncation, one search engine wants the asterisk at the end of a word, one wants an exclamation point, and a third will automatically truncate any term you type in. 

Your job, as a researcher, is to be aware of these different tools, and pay attention to how the individual search engine is treating your terms. 

First we'll try these search tools with Google, one of the more popular and easy-to-use Internet search engines.
	Google automatically puts an AND between words, so with this search, we'll get all the websites that have nicotine AND gum AND caffeine somewhere on the page.  Question 1 How many sites do you get with this search?
Look through your result list and try to find something that talks about the interaction between nicotine gum and coffee. Here's an example:
This is a long page, and you'll have to scroll down to get to the mention of coffee. A handy way to get there quickly is to:
Click on the edit button from the toolbar across the top of your screen.  Highlight FIND IN PAGE.  In the box that appears, type in coffee.  Click on FIND.  If the page jumps to a mention of the word 'coffee' that doesn't also talk about nicotine gum, click on the Find Next button.
Question 2 Describe a site that you found, give the URL and the organization that is supporting the website, and a short description of the site.

If we change the search to:

"nicotine gum" caffeine

then we'll get all the websites that have "nicotine gum" as a phrase, AND the word caffeine somewhere on the page. 
Question 3
How many sites do you get with this search?

In most searches, the goal is to get a list of results that are exactly on your topic. You don't have time to look through a list of 5, 000 sites. You need to find something specifically on your topic. Now you have two ways to reduce the number of results: the Boolean AND, and phrase searching. 

• The Boolean AND between terms tells the search engine to return only those websites that have ALL the terms. If it only has the term "caffeine", we don't want it. If it only has the word "gum", or only the word "nicotine", we don't want it. It must have all three terms.
  
• Phrase searching tells the search engine that the terms must show up together, and in that particular order. If the site mentions chewing gum as a way to fight the nicotine urge, we don't want it. It must have the phrase "nicotine gum" somewhere on the site. 

Let's try a search for the teacher at the wine and cheese party who takes antidepressants. We could try any of these searches:
"monoamine oxidase inhibitor"  will find all sites that contain this phrase. This strategy will probably result in too many sites that have nothing to do with the reaction to cheese, wine, or any other food containing tyramine.  You will have better luck combining words. Remember that in Google, the AND is automatically added between terms, unless you have quotes around terms.	"monoamine oxidase inhibitor" tyramine will find all sites that contain the phrase and the word 'tyramine'.  antidepressant wine cheese will find sites that contain all three of these terms, any place on the site, in any order.  antidepressant tyramine will find sites that contain both of these terms, anyplace, in any order.
Question 3 Try one of these searches in Google , and write a summary here of something that you found. Specifically, could you find information to support your text book description of this interaction? Please include the search terms you used.

Hot Bot, is a search engine we've already looked at. Remember the box in advanced search that lets you choose the type of search?
	Type in the Boolean phrase and select Boolean phrase from the options list.  Look through your results and see how easy it is to find something on the interaction between MAOIs and tyramine.  Remember to use your Find in page option by pulling down EDIT. This FIND tool will only search on one word at a time, so tyramine might be a good term to use.
Question 4 What do you think about the results of this search compared to the results you got using Google?

Another search engine, with still another method of using Boolean tactics, is AllTheWeb.

For this engine, we signify that we want a term to appear someplace in the document (Boolean AND) by putting a plus sign in front of the term.

+tyramine +antidepressant

Question 5
Try this search and look through these results. Can you find something that talks about the interaction between drug and nutrient? 

Question 6
How do these results compare to the results from Google and HotBot?

When you are working with Internet search engines, remember these points:

• Every search engine will treat your search terms differently. If the rules of a particular engine aren't obvious, click on the help or search tips links. 
• Every search engine searches a different part of the Internet, and will come up with a different list of results. If you can't find what you need in one engine, try another one. 

Try the three search engines that we've looked at to find information for the 14-year old girl taking antacids and suffering from constant fatigue.

For this scenario, think of the several different search terms we could use. Here's a sample list: 

antacid  constant fatigue

iron deficiency  anemia

Remember, to find a particular word in a website, pull down the Edit option from the items listed across the top of the screen, and highlight find in page . You can only search for one word, and it will only find the word on the website that is currently loaded. 
Question 7
Describe what search engines you used, what search terms you used, and what results you found. 

Search engines for magazine, newspaper and journal articles use the same Boolean connectors and phrase searching techniques. Remember Ebscohost, the index for popular and general magazine articles, wants the Boolean AND between individual search terms.

To keep terms together as a phrase, you can just type the terms, without the AND between them. Ebsco will read this as a phrase. 

This search will find all articles that contain the phrase "nicotine gum" and the single word "coffee".

 To truncate a word, type an asterisk (*) after the root. 

antacid* and iron will find any articles that mention the word antacid or antacids, plus the word iron. 

Using any of the information about drugs used to control hypermisis ( Lecture 5), search EBSCOhost for information in a newspaper or magazine. 

Question 7
Describe here something that you found that either supports the information in the lecture, or disagrees with it. 

Look at this listing for an article about the diet restrictions advised for people taking antidepressants:

To write a citation for a magazine article in the standard APA format, we need to rearrange the pieces of information in a particular order. Here's the formula: 

Author (last name, first name). Date (year, month 
      & day, if applicable, in parentheses). Article Title. 
Periodical Title (underlined). Volume number (underlined), 
page number.

Notice these particular things about the formula: 

• The second line is indented. 
• The periodical title is underlined. When you write citations for your research paper, you will actually underline the title. When you write citations on these web assignments, there is no way to underline in those text boxes, so you'll have to type an underline at the beginning and another at the ending of the title. 
• The volume number is underlined. 
• We don't use the issue number, or the length of the article.

Below is the format for the citation for our example. Notice that we start with the title of the article, since there is no author given, and the date comes after the title. 

Restricted Food List of MAOI Users Refined. (December 1996) 
        _Psychopharmacology Update_. _7_, 3.

Question 8
Write a citation for the article you examined . 

Medline, the index for professional medical literature, automatically puts the Boolean AND between terms. If you want to keep terms together as a phrase, you must put quotation marks around the terms. The search typed in below will search for the phrase "nicotine gum" plus the word "coffee". 

Try a few searches on one or more of the three drug interaction scenarios in Medline. Remember that you must click on the blue author's name to see a summary of the article. 
Question 9
Describe your results below, including the search terms that you used, and the name of the journal from at least one entry on your result list.

Summary

In this lesson, we've looked at three different Internet search engines:

• Google. 
  which automatically assumes a Boolean AND between your search terms. If you want the terms kept together as a phrase, you have to surround them with quotation marks.
• HotBot.
  which lets you select different ways to search from a pull-down list of options. 
• AllTheWeb
  which requires a plus sign before each term that must be included on the page.

and two different periodical search engines: 

• Ebscohost
  which indexes general and popular magazines, and 
• Medline
  which indexes professional medical literature. 

We've also played with these three search tools:

• Boolean AND
  To find terms anywhere on the page, whether they are together or not.
• Phrase searching
  To keep the terms together, in that particular order.
• Truncation
  To shorten a term down to its root and find all variations of that root.

Congratulations!

You've almost finished another one.

Make sure you add your  name, I.D.,  and your e-mail address to your answears , save a copy of your work  on disk then   send your answears to me as an  attachment   to an e-mail.   My e-mail address is:  barry_bw@yahoo.com

Address of this page:
https://barry-b.tripod.com/assignment5.html
For questions or comments,please send e-mail to
Barry Brazier at barry_bw@yahoo.com
Last updated on August 28, 2002.

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